The Totem-Maker (part fifty-three)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part fifty-three)

Our setting sail became urgent; no more could be postponed.

We crossed a plain of murmuring dark earth, from the outpost at the foot of the mountain, to the fingering ridges that brought us to the sea. A marvel of a sea this was, to teach me the shape of my land…a spit between waters. We rode twenty-four days.

On an anxious one of camping, soldiers had been set filling skins at a grey river, thin flowing, clear as the sky. But from this grey no blue reflected. The soldiers chained themselves downslope, fast fallen silent through this hour spent, passing skins hand to hand. They pulled sleeves over fingers to keep the waters from encrystalizing…

With ice, I’d thought, urging them speed. It was not ice, it was not salt, it was some other clear and shining substance, fragile, becoming dust in the strong east winds. They kicked dust from their boots, as the lowest men came to the top, and it sparkled away under a dreary sun. Neither under sail, nor for our remaining time crossing this plain, would we come by water so easily.

The flavor of Lotoq’s wrath was sweet, somewhat iron.

Gazing where we’d come, I saw a plateau of black sand. Height and distance showed rectangles of roofs, sunken streets between. I had never wished to know it. I had never thought to see the legend of the buried city proved truth, in its pitiful humanness.

The people must sleep underground posed as death had found them.

But the city went unnamed as we passed, that city of Lom’s family, and so I cannot name it to you, today. I felt the wish of the dead to be named, to be risen from burial, given chance to appease the god—and the taste of them in their water I will not forget.

We reached a harbor town, called Sianka. The Siankans said nothing I, or the soldiers, could understand. Terse of speech regardless, they lived behind a wall. They had hammered a gangway, years of pounding rock on rock, making the natural cliff their protector. Tunnels they had hammered, too, chutes from wall to town. The town was only stone huts, thatched in dried seaweed.

The Siankans kept pigs. Horses were unknown to them. But the sea they knew.

Their leaders enriched themselves selling pot upon pot of dried fish, fermented broth of fish, an oil of fish that burned well in lamps and thickened in the cold air, making sails taut against the wind, ships faster.

The Prince sailed with his knights; he had his wife along, and her attendants—she, eager, I had been told, for battle. The royal craft was light, a single-masted ship to give its commander pains, in the wake of our larger vessels. The winds were turbulent on this sea the Siankans named the Zablenen, driving from the south, whirling from the north, ever weeping rain, and frigid.

Siankan priests for our leave-taking skinned two of our sheep, emptying them of brains (potted in wine for the Prince), as the Siankan rite did not forbid it. The sheep were thrown to the waves from a Siankan tower. As I played priest to the Prince’s army, this was my dignitary’s role, to watch. I shivered to see a monster of Zablenen come at the god’s bidding, white belly thrashing, maw thrusting…

But the creatures, the poor sheep, were dead.

57

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part fifty-four)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)